A series of performers appears on the huge stage in the Bastille. Among a group of kissing, dancing young people, blond hair blowing in the wind (this is the first time he has seen her with her hair down), Simon recognizes Anastasia.
What were the odds of him bumping into her again, tonight, in this crowd? The thought flashes through Simon’s mind that either he is being manipulated by a really bad novelist or Anastasia is some sort of superspy.
Onstage, the group Téléphone are playing their hit, “?a (C’est Vraiment Toi).”
Their eyes meet and, as she dances with a long-haired guy, Anastasia gives him a little wave.
Bayard has seen her too; he tells Simon that it’s time for him to go home.
“You’re not staying?”
“It’s not my victory. You know I voted for the other baldy. Anyway, I’m too old for all this.” He gives a vague wave at the groups of people jumping up and down in time with the music, getting drunk, smoking joints, and making out.
“Oh, give me a break, granddad—you weren’t saying that at Cornell when you were high as a kite, screwing God knows who with your friend Judith up your ass!”
Bayard does not take the bait:
“Anyway, I’ve got cabinets full of files that I need to shred before your friends get their … get hold of them.”
“What if Defferre offers you a job?”
“I’m a fonctionnaire. I’m paid to serve the government.”
“I see. Your patriotism does you honor.”
“Shut your mouth, you little twerp.”
The two men laugh. Simon asks Bayard if he isn’t curious to at least hear Anastasia’s side of the story. Bayard puts out his left hand to shake and tells him, watching the young Russian woman dance: “You can tell me later.”
And Bayard vanishes into the crowd.
When Simon turns around, Anastasia is standing in front of him, covered in sweat and rain. There is a brief moment of awkwardness. Simon notices that she is looking at the space where his missing hand should be. To create a diversion, he asks her: “So, what do they think about Mitterrand’s victory in Moscow?” She smiles. “Brezhnev, you know…” She hands him a half-empty can of beer. “Andropov is the coming man.”
“And what does the coming man think of his Bulgarian counterpart?”
“Kristeva’s father? We knew he was working for his daughter. But we couldn’t work out why they wanted the function. It’s thanks to you that I was able to discover the existence of the Logos Club.”
“What will happen to him now, Kristeva Senior?”
“Times have changed. This isn’t ’68 anymore. I have not received any orders. Not for the father or for the daughter. As for the agent who tried to kill you, we last saw him in Istanbul, but after that we lost track of him.”
The rain falls harder. Onstage, Jacques Higelin sings “Champagne.”
In a pained voice, Simon asks her: “Why weren’t you in Venice?”
Anastasia ties up her hair and takes a cigarette from a soft packet, but is unable to light it. Simon leads her to a sheltered place, under a tree, above the Port de l’Arsenal. “I was following another trail.” She had discovered that Sollers had entrusted a copy of the seventh function to Althusser. She didn’t know it was a false document, so she searched everywhere in Althusser’s apartment while he was in an asylum—and that required a great deal of work because there were tons of books and papers, the document could have been hidden anywhere, and she had to be extremely methodical. But she didn’t find it.
Simon says: “That’s a shame.”
Behind them, onstage, they catch a glimpse of Rocard and Juquin, hand in hand, singing “The Internationale,” echoed by the entire crowd. Anastasia mumbles the words in Russian. Simon wonders if the Left can actually be in power, in real life. Or, more precisely, he wonders if, in real life, it is possible to change one’s life. But before he is drawn, once again, down the rabbit hole of his ontological reflections, he hears Anastasia whisper to him: “I’m going back to Moscow tomorrow; tonight, I’m not on duty.” And, as if by magic, she takes a bottle of champagne from her bag. Simon has no idea how or where she got it, but who cares? They take turns drinking from the bottle, and Simon kisses Anastasia, wondering if she is about to slice open his carotid artery with a hairpin or if he will fall to the ground, poisoned by her toxic lipstick. But Anastasia lets him kiss her, and she isn’t wearing lipstick. With the rain and the celebrations in the background, the scene is like something from a Hollywood film, but Simon decides not to dwell on this.
The crowd yells: “Mitterrand! Mitterrand!” (But the new president is not there.)
Simon goes up to a street vendor who has drinks in his cooler, including, for tonight only, champagne. So he buys another bottle and uncorks it with one hand, while Anastasia smiles at him, her eyes shining from the alcohol and her hair, unpinned again, falling over her shoulders.
They clink their bottles together and Anastasia shouts over the clamor of the storm:
“To socialism!”
Everyone around them cheers.
And Simon replies, as a flash of lightning streaks across the Paris sky:
“The real kind!”
96
The French Open men’s final, 1981. Borg is crushing his opponent yet again, this time the Czechoslovakian Ivan Lendl; he takes the first set 6–1. All the heads in the crowd turn to follow the ball, except for Simon’s, because his thoughts are elsewhere.
Maybe Bayard doesn’t care, but he wants to know; he wants proof that he is not a character in a novel, that he lives in the real world. (What is it, the real? “You know it when you bump into it,” Lacan said. And Simon looks at his stump.)
The second set is tougher. The players send clouds of dust into the air when they slide around on the dry court.
Simon is alone in his box until a young North African–looking man joins him. The young man sits on the seat next to his. It’s Slimane.
They greet each other. Lendl snatches the second set.
It is the first set Borg has lost in the entire tournament.
“Nice box.”
“An advertising agency rents it, the one that did Mitterrand’s campaign. They want to recruit me.”
“Are you interested?”
“I think we can call each other tu.”
“I’m sorry about your hand.”
“If Borg wins, it’ll be his sixth Roland-Garros title. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“Looks like he’s got a good chance.”
It’s true: Borg will pull away quite quickly in the third set.
“Thank you for coming.”
“I was passing through Paris anyway. Was it your cop friend who told you?”
“So you live in the U.S. now?”
“Yeah, I got my green card.”
“In six months?”
“There’s always a way.”
“Even with the American government?”
“Yep, even with them.”
“What did you do, after Cornell?”
“I ran off with the money.”
“I know that bit.”
“I went to New York. To start with, I enrolled at Columbia University and took a few courses.”
“In the middle of the academic year? Is that possible?”
“Yeah, sure, you just have to convince a secretary.”
Borg breaks Lendl for the second time in the set.
“I heard about your victories in the Logos Club. Congratulations.”
“Actually, that reminds me: isn’t there an American branch?”
“Yes, but it’s still embryonic. I’m not sure there’s even a single tribune in the whole country. There’s a peripatetician in Philadelphia, I think, one or two in Boston, maybe, and a few dialecticians scattered over the West Coast.”
Simon doesn’t ask him if he’s planning to join.
Borg takes the third set 6–2.
“Got any plans?”
“I’d like to get into politics.”
“In the U.S.? You think you can get American nationality?”
“Why not?”
“But you want to, uh, stand for election?”
“Well, I need to improve my English first, and I need to be naturalized. After that, it’s not just a question of winning debates to become a candidate; you have to—what’s the expression?—do the hard yards. Maybe I’ll be able to aim for the Democratic primaries in 2020, who knows. Not before that, though, ha ha.”
Precisely because Slimane sounds as if he’s joking, Simon wonders if he isn’t serious.